Harvest decline shows in Ecija as few workers take farm jobs

A BOY in the Science City of Munoz is forced to harvest his grandfather’s rice plants due to a shortage of farm workers after Typhoon “Santi” struck and damaged the province’s farms. ANSELMO ROQUE/INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON

CABANATUAN CITY—Harvesting palay is usually a happy event in rice farming communities in the agricultural province of Nueva Ecija.

It signals the end of more than three months of waiting for grains to be available again not only for tillers and owners of the land, but also for farm workers.

For harvesters, they get the “ka-kinse” wage, or a share of a cavan (50 kilograms) per 15 cavans. Landowners usually prioritize hiring the workers, who had transplanted their rice seedlings, when harvest time comes.

But only a few in the towns and cities of Nueva Ecija are responding to the call for farm labor.

“Many are declining to join the harvest now,” said Tranquilino Tajon, 60, a tenant farmer in the Science City of Muñoz.

“It has become difficult to harvest palay that is lodged and stuck to the soil,” he said.

Typhoon “Santi,” which battered Central Luzon provinces, including Nueva Ecija, on Oct. 11 and 12, has brought down high expectations for what is supposed to be a relatively good rice cropping this season.

Serafin Santos, Nueva Ecija provincial agriculturist, said most of the crops were ready for harvest while others were in their “soft dough” stage (when grains have yet to become fully mature for harvesting) when Santi struck.

Heavy losses

He said 165,000 hectares of rice crops in the province were damaged by the typhoon. The province lost 108,721 metric tons.

Tajon said as a result of the lodging of the palay, harvesters must bend as low as they can to scoop a handful of the stalk and cut it with their scythes. It doubled their effort and time compared to their usual way of harvesting palay, he said. “It is very stressful and painful to the hips,” he said.

Because of the condition of the crops, harvesters could not be faulted for demanding a “ka-diyes” share, which meant a cavan for every 10 cavans of palay, he said.

In Barangay (village) Bakod-bayan here, a sharecropper said nobody wanted to harvest in retaliation to a landowner.

He said in the last cropping season, the landowner used a mechanical harvester, depriving farm workers of jobs. The machine not only cuts the crop but also threshes, bags grains and takes the bagged palay to a designated area.

The farmer said he and the landowner called on relatives, including children, to help harvest the crop. “The rice grains are already overripe that’s why they must be harvested,” he said. Another downside is the low buying price offered by traders.

“Traders are buying palay at only P12 to P13 a kg. Before the typhoon came, the buying price was P14 to P15 a kg,” the farmer said.

While harvest is expected to suffer a decline as a result of Santi’s destruction, a bill has been filed in the House of Representative seeking to stop the practice of the National Food Authority (NFA) of importing rice through government-to-government transactions.

Monopoly importer

The bill, filed by Agri-Agra Reporma para sa Magsasakang Pilipino (AGRI) Rep. Delph Gan Lee, seeks to rationalize the NFA’s role in the food sufficiency program.

Titled “National Food Authority Rationalization Act of 2013,” the bill would phase out the function of NFA as a rice importer and transfer this role “exclusively” to “private sector entities and farmers’ organization subject to appropriate tariffs and quotas.”

“The NFA has both regulatory and proprietary functions over the grain sector. It sets import quantities and also works as the lone importer of the authorized volume of imports,” said the bill filed by Gan Lee.

“Such interventions over the years created severe distortions in the rice market, contributing, among others, to the poor productivity of the rice sector,” it said.

She quoted a study by the International Rice Research Institute as saying that “under the NFA monopoly of rice importation, Filipino consumers have ended up paying more for rice than they would have had to under a free trade regime.”

The alleged monopoly is reflected in this year’s importation statistics, where the Department of Agriculture, through the NFA, nearly doubled government imports from 120,000 MT in 2012 to 205,700 MT as of April this year.

On the other hand, private sector importation was reduced to 3 percent of this year’s total imports from 76 percent last year—a 98-percent reduction in quantity.